


bound

by SkadizzleRoss



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Ancient History, Canon-Typical Violence, Charades, First Meetings, Language Barrier, Little Deaths of a Less Fun Variety, M/M, Meet-Cute, POV Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani, Pre-Canon, Pre-Relationship, Protective Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, Roadtrip, Temporary Character Death, enemies to idiots to lovers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-16
Updated: 2020-08-16
Packaged: 2021-03-06 06:02:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,356
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25938607
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SkadizzleRoss/pseuds/SkadizzleRoss
Summary: Yusuf kills a man at the gates of Nicaea. The next day, he kills him again.The third time, he decides to kidnap him.(A language barrier roadtrip, or: the violent Nicky and Joe meet-cute.)
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 33
Kudos: 733





	bound

**Author's Note:**

> Apologies for any historical or language inaccuracies in advance, my Crusades knowledge is 95% from Wiki University, 5% from _Indiana Jones_.
> 
> For reference:  
> This intro is at the Siege of Nicaea in Anatolia (Turkey), which was the stronghold of the Seljuk Sultan of the time, Kilij Arslan. He was caught rather unawares by the joint armies of the Byzantines and the Princes' Crusade. Wasn't even home, in fact. 
> 
> Joe is not pleased to be here.

The first time is simple enough. They meet on the field, and Yusuf wins.

Of course he dreams of him. He has not taken many lives, and none so definitively, so _easily_ \- a tight sweep of his sword, the tug of meat and cartilage on his blade, and the man’s throat gapes wide. The white of his shirt stains scarlet red, blurring the boundaries of the holy symbol stitched there.

He dreams of this again, and again: he is young, his pale eyes are wide with surprise. His hand keeps its grip on the sword, even as he falls to his knees.

He dreams of him dying. And then he dreams of him waking, gasping, in the mud. This seems wishful thinking.

Another dawn, another incursion rebuffed at the city gates. Nicaea isn’t even _his_ city, but here he is, wetting his blade again and again, feeling the bite of a glancing arrow or a passing sweep of a mace again and again, but they’re only ever glancing blows. They call him _Yusuf The Bloodless._ Beneath the tears in his tunic, there’s never a scratch.

(Although there is pain, often; the surprised anticipation of it, he thinks. You never know how hurt you are until you get a good look. And judging by the surprise on most men’s faces, even then-- you are not certain.)

And then that face in the crowd. Pale eyes.

Cold curls around his heart. Logic overrides, as it usually does: perhaps this is a brother. A brother who took up that blood-stained tunic and pulled it over his chainmail. Took up the sword, took up that sharp, hunting look--

Surely.

He certainly looks angry enough to be a brother, when he turns and lunges towards Yusuf across the field.

Yusuf kills him again.

Yusuf dreams of him again.

Now, the third time...

That is harder to logic out.

He has plenty of time to ponder it, because he is dying. He’s fairly certain he’s dying. He’s never died before, but he’s seen quite a bit of it. Delivered it, in point of fact.

Delivered it _twice_ now to the one whose fine nobleman sword is resting in his gut.

“How--” he asks, eloquently, around the welling metallic taste in his throat. Tacky and choking. He feels rather cold, despite the humid day.

This man - this _demon_ \- only studies him, a hand curled tight in the leather straps of his armor. Lips curled in some sort of fervor, resolving to--

Pity? Disappointment?

Yusuf isn’t certain.

And either way, he’s dying. And then dead.

Mostly dead.

He wakes tasting mud and... dates? He wakes to someone dragging him back to the gates of Nicaea (these damn _gates_ ), asking why he thought a slaughterhouse was a good place to sleep.

The fourth time, he seeks the man out.

He finds him. He _kills him._ Guts him in turn, and watches recognition spread across his graying face. It does not give way to surprise, though. No. There’s something like wonder on the man’s face, before his gaze goes dim and the blood pouring down Yusuf’s arm slackens.

And then--

And then, Yusuf seizes the man in a impulsive embrace and shoves backwards. They fall together, down into the trench Yusuf himself had helped dig, long-fouled with dead in these long weeks of fighting.

He kneels in the trench and takes the fine nobleman’s sword for himself, binds the man’s hands in strips of leather stolen off a nearby corpse. Of course, he is a corpse, too, isn’t he? Eyes glassy, limbs pliant. Still with that strange curl to the corner of his lips. _Wonder._

“You’re mad,” Yusuf informs the corpse, barely audible beneath the roar of men above.

Then he begins to drag him. He drags him down the length of the firmament, until the stomach-churning sludge of the trench dilutes out into the open lakewater, blessedly cool and blessedly odorless.

He removes the man’s tunic - torn and bloodied thrice over, now - and the chainmail beneath, caked with mud and mended in nearly as many places as Yusuf's own jerkin. He needn’t bear that tremendous weight of the mail in addition to the rest.

By the time he’s finished, he's twitching awake. Yusuf thinks, dully, _I am observing a miracle, or a curse._ Minutes ago, the bloody hole in his undershirt had shown the bright pink of his lungs. Now, there’s smooth flesh.

The man blinks up at him as he finishes tying a gore-slick rope around his hands. He crinkles his nose as the onslaught of mud and rot catches up to him in his new life. Without warning or preamble, Yusuf takes the rope over his shoulder and walks into the waves of the lake, dragging the man along with him.

The man assists with flailing kicks, voices wet protests when he’s able to reach the surface for air. They collapse together on the far bank, washed clean of the war that echoes distantly across the water.

 _Thrice-dead,_ Yusuf thinks. A miracle, or a demon.

Toward evening, Yusuf settles on a rock and turns his face up towards a smoke-stained sky.

There's shuffling in the dirt beside him. A boot thumps his. Yusuf looks down and scowls as the bound man gestures to the canteen in his hands.

“Thirsty?” Yusuf asks, knowing full well the man won’t understand. He takes a long drink, wipes his mouth. “You should’ve drank during our swim.”

(Yusuf suspects the man might have drowned a bit, somewhere in their crossing. He seems not the worse for wear.)

The man jostles his foot again and gestures at him until he’s red in the face (a feat, sunburned as he is already). At last, Yusuf pulls the gag free. The man speaks the same word, again and again. Clearly a question, but which, Yusuf isn’t sure. Not until he starts jabbing his hands at the landscape - north, then east, then west.

‘Where are we going?’, Yusuf suspects. _‘Do-ve_ ’ seems to mean ‘ _where.’_

“East,” Yusuf says, and points. “To anyone who might explain what in God's name you are." What he is, now. But most importantly, he's getting away from this pointless war. Let the sultan save his city, if he cares so much for it. Yusuf has given his life, as he was asked to do.

As dusk settles, the sun’s glow lingers over Nicaea. Smoke smears the sky, black and billowing. Yusuf drags the man to his feet once more.

Yusuf seeks distance, first. He points his feet east, to Tephrike; there’s a decent hospital there, if it hasn’t been overrun by some random incursion of idiots. Easterner or Westerner, does it matter much? They’ve all gone mad. Seljuks stinging with the abrupt threat to their recent expansions. Byzantines rushing to join their invading allies with their myriad tongues. And these invaders doing... God knows what, seeking their righteous war out here in the endless hills and valleys of Anatolia.

If the surgeons of Tephrike don’t express an interest, he’ll go back to his own academic circles in Baghdad. And if _they_ show no interest, perhaps to Jerusalem. On to Cairo and the Caliphate, if he must, to find an interested ear. Preferably of a medical mind, but if not...

Well. God will sort this unnatural thing out, one way or another.

He talks as they walk. It seems only polite.

He lectures and rages in turns. Twists on his heel to announce, “We did not ask you to come here, did we? Your _People’s Crusade._ Civilians and their paltry weapons. We did not ask them to come here and be slaughtered, there was nothing _righteous_ or _holy_ to their greed and stupidity, and nothing righteous to you coming here to-- what? Avenge them?”

The man watches him, through this tirade. He shifts on aching feet, lifts his hands to scratch awkwardly at a sunburnt ear.

“As intellectually gifted as the rest of them, I see,” Yusuf says, and marches on.

He knows he’s equally worthless, of course, whenever the man bursts into his incomprehensible speech. But he is the one with the rope.

When he must rest, he ties the man up and sleeps in the dirt.

More often than not, he dreams. Not of the man, anymore. Now he only dreams of the mountains, arcing impossibly high. 

He ties the man to a tree outside a small farmhold, lost in grainfields. He returns with a spare water flask, bread and a bowl of stew, a grateful gift for their Seljuk defender. (They do not seem perturbed that he is walking the wrong way.)

He gives the man a small portion, befitting of his lanky figure. As he eats, he says, “I’ll give you to the nearest imam. Let God sort you out.”

The man nods along, responding merely to his congenial tone, no doubt.

Yusuf grumbles. He does not let him keep the canteen.

“I think I’ll take you to a butcher,” he announces, a day later. He climbs an old goat path on aching feet, scattering rocks behind for the man to stumble over. He cannot die, but his muscles can burn, his heels can blister, his throat can run dry and his belly can sear with hunger. What gift is this? What curse?

“I’m sure there’s rumors of the sort, there always are,” he continues. “‘Those Muslim. They eschew the pig for human flesh, I hear. Eyes on their stomachs and mouths stretching hip to hip, I hear.’ I’ve seen your maps. Tch. Childish nonsense. Made-up monsters.” Yusuf gives the rope another impatient tug, feeling bone-weary and _hungry._ “A butcher. Yes. They’ll carve an arm off, roast it over a fire. You can smell yourself cook while the next arm regrows. It would regrow, wouldn’t it?”

He hasn’t experimented with this, but he did nearly decapitate him. He wonders if the body will grow from the head, or the head from the body--? 

He turns on the path to study him. His stomach lurches at the dizzying drop down the rocky slope to the dry riverbed below. All the man need do is tug the rope at the wrong moment, and he could drag them both to a messy, tumbling death.

But he doesn’t. He comes to a stop in his steady plodding, squinting up at him against the midday glare of the sun.

“Nicolo,” the man replies, as though in answer to Yusuf’s contemplative stare.

“What?”

“Nicolo.” He points at his own chest, and repeats it a third time.

“Tch,” Yusuf answers, and turns away again.

Before dawn the next morning, he wakes to the taste of dates ( _always_ , the taste of dates) and a long stretch of a sword, gooseflesh prickling on his throat beneath that deceptively gentle pinprick of cold.

“Nicolo,” the man says again, and then gestures cordially towards Yusuf, expectant.

“Yusuf,” he answers.

Nicolo nods, and sheaths his sword. He even goes so far as to offer Yusuf a hand up from the dirt.

Yusuf seizes his forearm and drags him down, scrambling for the buckle on the other man’s swordbelt. After some ungainly scuffling in the dirt, Yusuf wheezes against the heavy weight of the lithe man sitting firmly planted on his chest.

He says something. It’s irritatingly incomprehensible, as always. Yusuf slams his boot in the dirt and calls him a pig’s whore. Nicolo’s brow creases in confusion, but he understands the tone enough to look offended.

When Yusuf runs short of breath to curse with, Nicolo holds up the binds he’d so neatly slipped and rambles on in those blurred, mellifluous syllables. Then he tosses the binds aside and climbs to his feet. Offers him a hand up, yet again.

Yusuf takes his forearm. Waits.

Nicolo stares at him, waits.

Then pulls him to his feet.

Yusuf brushes the dirt from his clothes and regards him with heated irritation, an angle of shame. He has shown mercy. Something Yusuf has not offered him. Three times, now. (Possibly four. He really can't be to blame for the lake.)

Nicolo points back and forth between them and skates a hand on a flat plane.

 _‘Equal_ ,’ perhaps?

“Absolutely not,” Yusuf snaps. “ _You_ are an abomination.”

Nicolo shrugs affably and smiles. 

Then he waves a hand on. This gesture, at least, is clear. ‘Shall we?’

Nicolo is Italian.

They establish this with a drawing in the dirt. Yusuf thinks he does a quite good cartographer’s interpretation of the Mediterranean, and to his relief, Nicolo recognizes it: he sketches a small 'x' near the heel of Italy.

“Italia,” he announces, and Yusuf agrees.

Nicolo proceeds to make a right mess of his careful map, dragging the stick enthusiastically through Italy’s eastern provinces, past the foothills of the Alps, along the northern coast and on to Anatolia. His merry band hasn’t made it far. While the current sultan’s seat of power, Nicaea is still far to the west, the very edges of the Seljuks’ more recent Byzantine acquisitions.

Yusuf points to his own home - a small town in the foothills of Iran - and to his more recent haunt, the academies of Baghdad. He’d gone there to learn medicine. And now here he is, bleeding and sweating on soil he cares little for. Far, very far, _foolishly_ far, for what?

Nicolo nods his understanding, repeats the names Yusuf puts to each ‘x’ back. Then he seizes the stick again.

It’s a long and contrived charade - crude sketches in the dirt, wild gesticulations - before Yusuf makes sense of what the Italian is saying.

At last he crosses his arms and announces, “No. Absolutely not.”

Nicolo frowns at him, reiterates his argument. A jab at the figure in the clouds above Italy, marked by the Christian cross - _my god_ \- and another at the figure above the East. _Your god._

“Absurd. There’s only one,” Yusuf insists, “and you are not _chosen_ , you are _cursed._ ”

Nicolo makes an irritable face, and whips the stick across Yusuf’s bare arm. Yusuf shouts and jumps upright. He grips at the hot line of pain, studying the rising welt of blood with dismay.

And they both watch as it--

Heals.

The thin beads of blood clot and then scab, and by the time Yusuf is brushing the scabs aside, there is nothing beneath. Unblemished skin.

Nicolo regards him smugly. He points to both gods, and locks his hands together. _Bound._

Within a week’s travel, Tephrike rises above the sloped cobbles of the road. A fine road, built by the last wave of Westerners to take an interest in this dirt-pit of a country.

It is boring. Utterly _boring._ He does not want this country. They can have it. Its rocks and its dust and its scrubby plants. Romans, Byzantines, what does it matter? He has tasted death, now. He’s done with these empires and their blindly grasping ambitions.

Nicolo walks freely beside him. He does not bolt, only follows agreeably. Yusuf thinks he will follow him anywhere, although he’s yet to discern _why._ Nicolo certainly tries to explain. Gestures and long, rambling inquiries. Yusuf quickly loses patience, turning his attention away.

He will walk to the hospital and gather the doctors around and split Nicolo’s throat open, paint the tiles with his blood. He will stand over them, ignoring the crashing waves of their noisy panic, and slowly turn Nicolo over with a boot, tilt his chin up to show the rapidly knitting flesh there.

He will let them declare him a miracle, or an aberration. They will lock him away for study, or cart him off to the nearest prison. He does not care.

He does not _care._ He will pass this abomination along and go his way.

Soon. Very soon, he thinks as he stands in a crowded Tephrike marketplace and watches said abomination get fleeced for his foreign coin.

(It is on the way to the hospital. This is his logic.)

He yanks the silver out of Nicolo’s hand and gestures to the paltry pile of spiced meat the vendor has laid out on a cloth. “For this, we will take a bushel more.”

The vendor smiles and nods, piling the meat higher. As though he wasn’t prepared to sell a quarter of it, seconds before. Yusuf deposits the bundle of food in Nicolo’s hands with a scowl.

He buys some dried dates with his own coin.

They do not make it to the hospital.

Twilight finds them walking the road again. Following one failed empire’s old paths east, and east, and east, deep into the newest empire’s lands. The Italian chatters on about-- something. Yusuf ignores him and turns his face up to the stars. The dates do not bury that dream taste, turns out. Too bitter. Yusuf scatters them to the side of the road, murmuring a curse.

He dreams each night. Of two women, and a man. Of mountains. Dry air, dry on the mouth and throat, but he wakes to the taste of dates, always.

He wakes to the Italian watching him, eyes bright with the embers of the fire.

_Dreams?_ Nicolo asks at first light, through a series of irritating charades. Head tilted aside, hands pillowed against his ear. He presses a palm to his forehead, and then lifts it to the heavens in vague, butterfly-like flaps of his fingers.

“You are an idiot,” Yusuf states, but he also nods to mark his regrettable comprehension.

At Yusuf’s nod, Nicolo drops to a knee and begins to scratch out another pictograph in the dust: mountains. A terrible interpretation - he is no artist - but Yusuf recognizes the shape beneath.

“You’re missing the dates,” Yusuf mutters in disbelief. He smudges the impression of a palm tree into place with the toe of his boot. Nicolo frowns, not recognizing it. Typical.

He buys a wax tablet in the next town and sketches each of the faces in turn. Woman, woman, man. Nicolo nods eagerly at each. Seizes the tablet from his hands and tilts it appreciatively in the dusk, saying something admiring. "Yes, I know it's good," Yusuf mutters, seizing it back.

Yusuf dreamed of this man waking in the mud, and now this man dreams his dreams: jagged mountains capped in snow. A rocky valley. The great mountains surrounding the eastern Indus Valley, he thinks. He’s only seen them in drawings, but - where else do the mountains scrape the bowl of the sky like this?

Nicolo regards him over the tablet. Searching the corners of his face, asking a plaintive question. He points east.

“No,” Yusuf says abruptly, and smears the paler woman’s steady gaze with an impatient swipe of his hand. “No. I am going _home._ I am going away from this insanity and back to-- to _books,_ to medicine, to everything I meant to learn before this _damned war--”_

Nicolo studies him, unblinking. Then he clasps his hands together, fingers interwoven.

Yusuf considers kicking him in the balls. They would heal, likely.

“No,” he says again. “Accompany me as far as you like, but no. Aimless journeys are your business, not mine, crusader.”

He walks.

Nicolo follows.

He watches as Nicolo delights over the rare find of a clay flask of port, dark and rich and sour-smelling, in a blessedly cool backstreet of Malatya. This time, Yusuf allows him to overpay. 

(But he does attempt a single sip of it that evening, at the Italian’s cheerful insistence. He even succeeds in not spitting it out, although he comes quite close. And by the Italian’s laughter, his distaste is plain.

Irritated, Yusuf takes another, more ambitious swig, and swallows it back with a pointed glare. He does not think he will be answering for such a sin anytime soon.)

On the banks of the Tigris, they die together.

A first.

The men pass them on horseback in the high grasses of summer, studying the swords on their hips with long, curious stares. Four of them, Turkish wanderers, armed for war.

They circle back at sunset.

Yusuf chokes on the arrow that punches through his chest from behind, just beneath the collarbone. He does not cry out. More of a surprised grunt, before he is falling to his knees.

Yusuf realizes something interesting: he has never seen Nicolo truly angry. Not until just now. He roars as he tears his sword free of its scabbard and wheels on the approaching horsemen. A noble, but ultimately useless stance. He has no shield. The arrows tear him through. Punching through thigh, belly, throat. Nicolo crumples. But he does not let the sword go.

This time, Yusuf dies quite warm.

He wakes to his third life with the rather unbecoming sensation of someone rifling through his tunic, tearing his coin purse free.

He stares at the Italian in the grass just nearby. The Italian stares back from a bloodstreaked, too-pale face, and winks.

What a strange new life this is.

The thief bends stupidly close as he attempts to count coin by the waning moon. His other hand grips the bloodied arrow he’s salvaged from Yusuf’s chest. Kind of him. He supposes if he hadn’t, Yusuf would’ve been forced to pull it out himself.

At the wet squelch nearby - and the familiar hoarse cry accompanying - Yusuf realizes Nicolo has confronted such a problem. He buries the arrow in the nearest thief’s skull, in recompense.

Yusuf seizes his own carrion crow by the collar and breaks his nose with his skull.

He hates killing. It is as pointless as death, these days. But he must admit, they are quite good at it. 

The men die with surprise and fear on their faces. (No wonder.)

They argue briefly over the choice of horse. Which is to say Yusuf takes the halter of the one he favors, Nicolo takes the same halter and glares at him over the puzzled animal’s head, they both share insults in their native tongues, Nicolo stomps on Yusuf’s foot, and in their distraction the other three horses scatter.

Nicolo keeps the horse. Yusuf takes the only other they manage to catch.

The saddlebags have water, provisions, proper bedrolls and - of course - more dried dates.

Nicolo chews the fruit with interest. He flaps a hand in a vague butterfly gesture.

With a scowl, Yusuf mimics it.

There comes a point when their paths should split: where Yusuf should turn south, to Baghdad, and Nicolo should continue east on his pointless crusade, on to mountains of boggling size.

South is the universities, the hospitals. South is all the knowledge he hasn’t gained yet; it’s study and shade and food that isn’t salted and preserved beyond recognition.

East is, well. The continued senseless chatter of the man riding at his side, and the dreams. A woman, a woman, and a man.

Mountains he’s never seen, scraping the bowl of the sky.

There comes a point where their paths should split, but they don’t.

“It’s good to see you’ve found kinship already,” the woman of his dreams says in flawless Arabic. Another _civilized human_ to talk to. Yusuf could weep with it. This, and new companions that regard him like an old friend from the shadows of this warm hut; the settling of something in his chest that he did not know was out of place.

Her name is Andromache. To Yusuf's surprise, she turns and listens to Nicolo's gabbling. She even answers in kind. Nicolo responds eagerly, startling a laugh and an upraised hand of _Please, slow down_ from the Greek.

“You can understand him?” Yusuf demands.

“Well enough. Lykon’s Italian is--”

Yusuf interjects, “Tell him he’s a hopeless infant of a human being.”

“--better,” Andromache finishes, eyebrows upraised. But she conveys something to Nicolo in measured tones, the quirk of a smile tugging at a corner of her lips.

Nicolo regards Yusuf with a wicked grin, reeling off a fast retort. Lykon laughs from his place tending the fire.

“What was that?”

“He says he’s enjoyed traveling with you,” Lykon replies, “even if you’re quite loud, and cannot stomach wine.”

“Bah. I do not _drink,_ you idiot.”

“‘That is good,’” Lykon translates. “‘You’re very bad at it.’”

“Better than you are at fighting. I’ve killed him three times, I’ll have you know.”

“Quattro,” Nicolo says, holding up four fingers. He points to Yusuf and folds three fingers away. “E tu, uno.”

“Three," Yusuf corrects. "But yes, precisely. I’m winning." He settles onto a bundle of furs, sets to freeing his feet at last from these damnable boots.

Nicolo shrugs and speaks. Andromache translates, “‘You were slower to understand.’”

“Oh, was I supposed to take the sword through the gut as an invitation for peace?”

Nicolo rambles on. “He didn’t know you were the same until you came back," Andromache explains. "He thought you were some sort of devil. Now, he understands you are both chosen.”

“As we are all chosen,” Lykon agrees. He pauses to translate this to Quynh, who nods, smiling quietly. Nicolo unfolds a cloth from his saddlebag. Dates, stolen from dead men. He holds them out to Quynh and Lykon in turn. They each select a dried date, chewing slow and contemplative.

“Chosen for _what?_ ”

Andromache shrugs and plucks a date of her own from Nicolo’s offered hand. “We don’t know.”

Nicolo asks something, a phrase Yusuf’s heard him say before. This time it's lilted into a question, but he’s said this a dozen times: after the bandits, over the wine passed around the campfire, under the shade of the mountain pines.

The first time, though, that was on the banks of the lake outside Nicaea; he’d dragged Nicolo up into the mud, flopped down alongside him. When the Italian finished spitting lakewater, he’d twisted onto his shoulder to study him gravely as he said, “Non abbiamo ancora finito.” 

Andromache answers in Arabic: slow, sounding out each word with care.

Nicolo nods grimly and turns to Yusuf. He repeats the Arabic back in halting, unfamiliar syllables: “We are not finished yet.” He speaks it as a promise.

“No,” Yusuf replies. “It seems not.” 

And then he selects a date, watching this strange, good-natured noble across the fire. Thinking of hands entwined.

It tastes precisely as he expected.


End file.
